Separated from her husband, Ellen finds herself living alone in a city she dislikes - a place that denies her past and offers no hope for her future. Determined to change her life, she decides to go south in search of sun and companionship.

With her inimitable gift for describing the workings of the heart and mind, Edna O'Brien introduces us to a vivid new cast of restless, searching people who-whether in the Irish countryside or London or New York-remind us of our own humanity. In "Send My Roots Rain," Miss Gilhooley, a librarian, waits in the lobby of a posh Dublin hotel-expecting to meet a celebrated poet while reflecting on the great love who disappointed her. The Irish workers of "The Shovel Kings" have pipe dreams of becoming millionaires in London, but long for their quickly changing homeland-exiles in both places. "Green Georgette" is a searing anatomy of class, through the eyes of a little girl; "Old Wounds" illuminates the importance of family and memory in old age. In language that is always bold and vital, Edna O'Brien pays tribute to the universal forces that rule our lives.

"How long it's taken for these two mad, bad and dangerous writers to get together!"—Alan Cheuse, San Francisco ChronicleAcclaimed biographer of James Joyce, Edna O'Brien has written a "jaunty" (The New Yorker) biography that suits her fiery and charismatic subject. She follows Byron from the dissipations of Regency London to the wilds of Albania and the Socratic pleasures of Greece and Turkey, culminating in his meteoric rise to fame at the age of twenty-four. With "a novelist's understanding of tempo and characterization" (Miami Herald), O'Brien captures the spirit of the man and creates an indelible portrait that explodes the Romantic myth. Byron, as brilliantly rendered by O'Brien, is the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless, and defiantly immortal.

Edna O'Brien's wonderful, wild and moving novel shocked the nation on its publication in 1960. Adapted for the stage by the author, The Country Girls, the play, is a highly theatrical and free-flowing telling of this classic coming of age story.

Three women (mistress, wife, and daughter) uncover their passion for the same man and confront the ways that love can simultaneously liberate and entrap. This lyrical and captivating drama weaves together their stories to construct the portrait of a man through the eyes of the women who love him.

A Pagan Place is Edna O'Brien's stunning novel about the uniquely wonderful, terrible, peculiar place she once called home. She writers not only of a life there - of a child becoming a woman - but of the Irish experience out of which that life arises. This is the Ireland of country villages and barley fields, of druids in the woods and of mischievous girls. Ireland has marked her life and work with unmistakable colour and depth, and here she recreates her homeland with a singular grace and intensity.

In 1960, Edna O'Brien published The Country Girls, her first novel, which so scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O'Brien, married with two sons, was undeterred and has since created a body of work that bears comparison with the best writing of the twentieth century. Country Girl brings us face to face with a life of high drama and contemplation. It is a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that imprint upon and enliven one lifetime.Starting with O'Brien's birth in a grand but deteriorating house in Ireland, her story moves through convent school to elopement, divorce, single-motherhood, the wild parties of the '60s in London, and encounters with Hollywood giants, pop stars, and literary titans. There is love and unrequited love, and the glamour of trips to America as an acclaimed writer hosted by Jackie Onassis and Hillary Clinton. Brilliant and sensuous, Country Girl is a book we are fortunate that Edna O'Brien decided to write.Review"Edna O'Brien has made of her memories something of both precision and depth, a book that, letting us see her as she was, jumps with an all-consuming curiosity from one lucidly narrated event to another, the scenes of disenchantment and bewilderment mingling with an assortment of surprises, traps, and ventures that are often, but not always, disastrous shocks. She is an observer of tears, including her own, and is able to differentiate what she calls the good tears from the bad. Only Colette is her equal as a student of the ardors of an independent woman who is also on her own as a writer." (Philip Roth) About the AuthorEdna O'Brien, author of The Country Girls Trilogy, A Fanatic Heart, The Light of Evening, Saints and Sinners, and many other books, is the recipient of the James Joyce Ulysses Medal and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in London.

Edna O'Brien's classic, rocket of a novel, Night, is narrated by one of her most memorably, unhinged characters, Mary Hooligan. Lying on a four-poster bed, unable to sleep, she recounts (mis)adventures, courtships, and sexual encounters of the most transgressive kind, in a narrative voice of blistering originality.Out of print for some time, and now made available in the wake of O'Brien's bestselling memoir, Country Girl, Night is a novel which introduces us to one of the most compelling and garrulous narrators in modern fiction.

Based on a horrendous true crime, IN THE FOREST si the story of Mich O'Kane -- 'not all there in the head' it's said -- who shoots three people dead in the woods of Ireland. Edna O'Brien traces the events that lead to such horror.Mich O'Kane hears voices; he cannot stop mourning the death of his mother. Theft and other crimes lead him to a Christian Brothers borstal, then to a British prison. By the time he returns home, he is an institutionalised criminal incapable fo telling the truth even to himself.Single mother Eily lives with her you son Maddie in a house Mich camped out in after his mother's death. One night Mich drags them out of the house and orders Eily to drive to the forest. The third death is that of a priest he entreats to come to the murder site.This tragic an starkly terrible story is told from various points of view, including Eily's, Mich's granny, a priest, but the core of it is Mich, born to fail. Can there be any hope for him?Amazon ReviewIrish novelist Edna O'Brien is again the centre of controversy with her latest novel In the Forest. Forty years ago her first six novels were banned but times have changed. She also wrote The Country Girls in 1962 and was vilified in Ireland. Taking as her subject matter the actual murders of a young mother, her toddler son and a priest in 1994 in County Clare, she is accused of exploiting grief, of gross insensitivity, of being motivated only by financial gain and of portraying Ireland as timeless and primitive. Her comeback is that "the novelist is the psychic and moral historian of his or her society. So it's about that part of Ireland I know very well...and the darkness that still prevails".Not surprisingly this "true crime" novel makes for sombre and uncomfortable reading. O'Brien is unquestionably skilled at deploying language to create a highly charged atmosphere: even Cloosh Wood, where much of the action unfolds, takes on its own sinister personality where "the light [becomes] darker and darker into the chamber of non-light". In tightly written chapters each with a change of narrator--the murderer himself, his sister and father, the murdered young woman, Eily Ryan, her sister, the priest, Father John, neighbours, the police--the effect is of accumulating tension and foreboding, despite our knowing (or because we know?) the terrible outcome. But in making the voices of her numerous characters so fragmented as to suggest a society in the grip of terror, O'Brien fails to make them resonate as individuals, except for the killer, the young psychotic, Mich. Brutalised at home, abused by his priests and his peers, he becomes the feared "kindershcreck". In his late teens he is released from jail for a string of crimes, and returns to his old turf. Stalked by the brutality of his past, he in turn stalks Eily Ryan, a hippy-ish figure, living with her three-year-old son in a ramshackle cottage that Mich had seen as his own lair. Eily becomes to him "all-mothering, all-sinning. She-devil...Now the ultimate flood of rage that has been waiting is loosed from the wrenched and bloodied sockets of his fucked life as he tears her clothing in an ecstasy of hate, as though tearing limb from limb all womankind". With these terrible deaths and the hunting down of Mich, O'Brien suggests that the crimes are not Mich's alone: fear, bigotry, misogyny, repression and silence permeate the culture. And out of this, such evils come. --Ruth PetrieReviewThis is still number 4 in Ireland, which is wonderful news. Edna is attending the Edinburgh Festival on 16 August. Just to remind you of the fantastic reviews the book has received over here: 'The writing is very well judged, for the most part, and is sometimes exceptional'Tom Dunne, The TLS 'The triumph of this book lies in its evocation of the violent adolescent boy... O'Brien isvery accomplished in her portrayal of his crazy scattergun speech.'Barbara Trapido, THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'This is a frightening, disconcerting and unforgettable piece of work.'Elizabeth Buchan, THE DAILY MAIL 'Nothing I have read since Blake Morrison's account of the James Bulger Case, AS IF, comes close to O'Brien's insights into the complex web of causes and contexts that make up the 'whys' of murder.'Laurence Warening, The HERALD 'By fictionalising her account, Ms O'Brien allows herself an imaginative freedom which gives thestory a new life, sharpening the sense of horror and the lost opportunity, while at no point allowing us to forget its truth.'The ECONOMIST 'O'Brien's portrayal of a community united in unease is faultless.'Claudia Fitzhebert, THEDAILY TELEGRAPH 'IN THE FOREST is one of her most powerful and effective novels, a model of its kind.'David Robson, THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'IN THE FOREST is a hauntingly sympathetic depiction of evil.... For O'Brien this is a Greek tragedy 'that needed to be written'. Fortunately her writing is poetic enoughfor you to feel that, yes, however painful, it also needs to be written.'VivGroksop, THE EXPRESS 'IN THE FOREST is a magnificent book, haunting, instinctive and shocking.... When art is this good, it cannot be afraid to speak out.'Louise Rimmer, SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY 'A spare, compelling and compassionate novel. IN THE FOREST was not just a worthwhile enterprise, but a necessary and successful one.'Ronan Bennett, THE GUARDIAN 'This is an ambitious, important book, dealing with difficult subjects directly and courageously.'Jonathan Heawood, THE OBSERVER 'O'Brien constructs a narrative of the peculiar combination of emotional simplicity and complexity that characterises a successful fairy story.'Jane Shilling, THE TIMES 'IN THE FOREST is a sort of fictionalised inner exploration of an outer horror, beautifully written, but yes, dark.'MaryKenny, THE SPECTATOR 'I read it avidly. O'Brien had done us a service, without diminishing the dead.'Melanie McDonagh, THE EVENING STANDARD 'This novel, splintered in its form but coherent in its potency, is a persuasive representation of a desperado, of one who has despaired.'Lucy Hughes-Hallett, THE SUNDA

In this contemporary story with universal resonance, Edna O'Brien delves deep into the intense relationship that exists between a mother and daughter who long for closeness yet remain eternally at odds.From her hospital bed in Dublin, the ailing Dilly Macready eagerly awaits a visit from her long-estranged daughter, Eleanora. Years before, Eleanora fled Ireland for London when her sensuous first novel caused a local scandal. Eleanora's peripatetic life since then has brought international fame but personal heartbreak in her failed quest for love. Always, her mother beseeches her to return home, sending letters that are priceless in their mix of love, guilt, and recrimination. For all her disapproval, Dilly herself knows something of Eleanora's need for freedom: as a young woman in the 1920s, Dilly left Ireland for a new life in New York City. O'Brien's marvelous cinematic portrait of New York in that era is a tour-de-force, filled with the clang and clatter of the city, the...

In Tales for the Telling you'll meet giants and leprechauns, heroes and princessesEdna O'Brien's collection of twelve quintessentially Irish stories of love and high deeds, which have been passed from generation to generation, are retold in her distinctive narrative style, brimming with magic and myth, nonsense and naughtiness.

Love and its objects are the common elements in these eight stories: the nervous love of a country mother for her sophisticated, town-living daughter, the adoration of a mistress for her married lover and less orthodox affairs between women and their illusions.